- "People began to evacuate, but an announcement over
the intercom said everything was all right, no need to evacuate.' 'At
10-story intervals, he had to walk through burning corridors. Bizarrely,
no sprinklers or alarms had been activated."
-
- Amazing, truly incredible... Why are the electronic News
and Newspapers keeping this story so quiet ??????
-
- Ok, assembled below you will find several mainstream
news accounts which chronicle the FACT that WTC Building Officials TOLD
workers to RETURN to their desks after the FIRST building was struck by
a jetliner.
-
- The question that you should be asking yourself is why
aren't more people talking about this, and what could that possibly mean?
Who gave this inscrutible and deadly order? Why? Would someone want
the body count to be higher?
-
- These questions may appear to assume that something sinister
is going on, but the purpose of any investigation is to ASSUME NOTHING,
including assuming that it was sheer incompetence!
-
- You will hear "explanations" below, but listen
to your own common sense, like many who survived did.
-
- If you find this as hard to believe as I do, then read
the accounts from Newsday and other mainstream media sources below. Even
after the FIRST tower was hit, people were told to not leave the building.
What is going on here? There are several different articles, please read
them all.
-
-
- Life And Death Decisions - Some Survivors Fled WTC Tower
Despite Announcement To Stay Put
-
- Newsday Magazine September 13, 2001
-
- The workers in Nancy Cassidy's office on the 80th floor
of Two World Trade Center had a head start on their escape: They fled after
a jet smashed the neighboring tower.
-
- "The fireballs flew past my window, and I hung up
the phone," Cassidy, 42, a Westbury resident who is personnel manager
for the Mizuho Capital Markets trading company, said yesterday. "I
went out of my private office and my boss was screaming, 'Get out, get
out.'"
-
- Fifty people on her side of the office had already cleared
out by the time she started the trek down the stairs.
-
- "All of a sudden you heard, 'Shhh,'" she said.
"Everyone was quiet. That's when they made that announcement: 'Building
One is in a state of emergency; Building Two is secure. You're fine, you
can return to your work stations.'"
-
- It was a difficult decision for the building's fire safety
staff, experts said. If employees left the as-yet unharmed tower, they
could be exposed to falling glass, concrete and aircraft parts. And high-rises
are considered generally safe during fires, with their sprinkler systems
and fire-resistant walls. On the other hand, there was no way of knowing
if Building Two would remain safe.
-
- The workers in Two World Trade Center faced the same
choice.
-
- "It was thousands of people, and you could hear
a pin drop in that stairway," Cassidy said. "It was incredible.
People were like, 'We're done; we're not going back up; we're leaving anyway.'"
-
- When a second hijacked jet struck the second tower 18
minutes after the first was hit, Cassidy was already down to the 44th floor.
-
- "When the plane hit our tower, you heard a boom,
and the building shook, the stairwell shook," she said. "It was
so scary."
-
- Tiffany Keeling, 32, of Albuquerque, was among 350 Morgan
Stanley financial advisers in training on the 61st floor of Tower Two.
She said her group also started to head downstairs immediately after the
first jet struck.
-
- She, too, heard the announcement.
-
- "An announcement came over the speaker system that
we were not in imminent danger and that we should return to our offices,"
Keeling said. "I continued down the stairs, and that's when the second
plane hit. I could smell the jet fuel."
-
- Dan Baumbach, 24, a software engineer from Merrick, was
stunned to find that building officials in One World Trade Center were
telling workers not to evacuate even after the first jet struck.
-
- "You can try it, but it's at your own risk,"
he quoted one official as telling a group of 100 people on the 75th floor.
Many chose to follow that advice; Baumbach continued his descent from the
80th floor and survived, but only after braving the debris that fell when
the neighboring tower collapsed.
-
- "The reason we got out was because we didn't listen,"
he said.
-
- Michael Cartier, 24, of Jackson Heights, said his sister
Michelle, who worked in Tower One, told him that after the first plane
struck, "'People began to evacuate, but an announcement over the intercom
said everything was all right, no need to evacuate.'
-
- "If this is true," Michael Cartier said, "they
told people to go back to their desks. There should be an investigation."
-
- Officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,
which runs the Trade Center, declined to discuss the evacuation. "I
have no comment on anything relating to that incident," said Ernesto
Butcher, the chief operating officer.
-
- A senior law enforcement official said there was conflicting
information, adding that authorities had no way of knowing for sure what
had happened.
-
- Robert Solomon, chief building fire protection engineer
for the National Fire Protection Association, said the fire safety staff
was in a difficult position. Once workers in the second tower left, he
said, they would be exposed to falling debris.
-
- "It's a terrible dilemma," he said. "If
the second plane doesn't come, it makes sense to stay where you are now."
-
- The 1993 terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center,
which killed six people and injured more than 1,000, taught some important
fire safety lessons. The fire control center was destroyed in that explosion,
cutting off communication. Electrical power failed, casting smoky stairways
into darkness.
-
- A study later by the National Fire Protection Association
found that the majority of people in the Twin Towers decided on their own
to evacuate.
-
- In this case, Cassidy said, the stairway was lit and
the public address system working.
-
- Cassidy, who had the job of giving out safety kits to
new employees in her office, said she had to wonder about those who heeded
the announcement.
-
- "It could be that because of that announcement,
some people from my company went back upstairs and now may be gone,"
she said.
-
- Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc. http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/newyork/ny-nyevac132363609sep13.story
___
-
-
- Survivors' Tales
-
- By Sandy Keenan, Karen Freifeld and Laurie Garrett Staff
Writers Newsday Magazine September 13, 2001
-
-
- Dan Baumbach, a software engineer who lives in Merrick,
had an 80th-floor office at One World Trade Center, where he saw the flying
debris and knew it was time to move.
-
- But heading down the stairs, he and four other co-workers
suddenly came upon 100 others, who were told by a building official, "We'll
get you out; be calm, just stay here."
-
- "There was no way we were going to stay there,"
said Baumbach, 24, who was then warned: "You can try it, but it's
at your own risk."
-
- Many stayed. Baumbach did not.
-
- At 10-story intervals, he had to walk through burning
corridors. Bizarrely, no sprinklers or alarms had been activated.
-
- There were traffic jams of human beings.
-
- "No one was pushing or yelling, but people were
upset. ... The lady next to me said she was in the first blast, in 1993.
I felt so bad for her."
-
- Some people fell by the wayside, exhausted. After 30
minutes, Baumbach would reach only the 30th floor, and still, no one knew
what had caused the accident - a helicopter? No one suspected terrorism.
By the 20th floor, firefighters would pass by. Then, he would get to an
escalator and see daylight.
-
- At that very moment, the second tower would collapse.
"The sheer force sent all this material flying through the windows
at us .... I kept my eyes shut; everything was burning. I put my shirt
over my mouth and took very short breaths. I remember bumping into people,
but I didn't hear anyone talking."
-
- Before the collapse, Baumbach remembers a police officer
jumping on top of him, effectively saving his life. He would never see
the officer again.
-
- The survivors of the World Trade Center attacks are of
different races, young and old, male and female. Some came from Long Island,
some from Connecticut, or New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx.
-
- But for a few, frantic, endless moments on Tuesday, the
survivors shared something that was uniquely their own: a fleeting sense
that this day might be their last.
-
- Nicholas Scinicariello, 62, of Yorktown Heights, worked
for the Port Authority on the 86th floor of Tower One.
-
- "I saw the plane come in. My office faces north.
I just finished my coffee and I heard my friend say, 'Oh no, oh no.' This
plane was coming right at us, then it went up and hit the upper floors.
I opened the door to my office. The fire alarms were all going off, the
fire doors were jammed because the building had been wracked. I finally
made it to one of the stairwells. The lights started to flicker on and
off. The stairwells were flooded. Firemen were passing us on the way up."
-
- He finally made it to Broadway and lay on a subway grate
for a half-hour, sucking in the fresh air.
-
- Norbert Peat of the Bronx, who works at Personal Computer
Rentals, was on the 79th floor of one of the towers. He had never been
in the Trade Center before.
-
- He had just made a delivery and gotten off the elevator
before the plane hit. He and a fireman hid behind a police car when the
building exploded and "he was able to give me oxygen. Thank God I
was with the right person."
-
- "There was a lot of gas when the plane hit ....
I was trying to go back. There were two ladies back there. I was really
worried about them. I couldn't get back, so I don't know if they perished
or not."
-
- Mark Oettinger, 35, a carpenter from Bay Ridge, was in
One World Trade Center on the 10th floor when the windows broke. He looked
at someone and said, "Let's get out of here." There was too much
smoke, so he actually went up to the 20th floor and sat there for 20 minutes
with about 100 others. When the building started to rumble, some people
placed paper towels over their mouths and headed down again; others remained
behind.
-
- In the courtyard, "there were bodies all over. ...
Parts of the building were falling off and killing people - panes of glass,
as they broke, took out two or three people at a time. People were jumping
out of windows. One guy no more than two or three feet from me jumped out
a window.
-
- "It looked like a meat market. There were shoes
and feet ... [body] parts laying around."
-
- Mary Conklin, 30, who escaped from the 72nd floor of
the World Trade Center, walked the streets of lower Manhattan yesterday
in a daze, searching for co-workers from the Department of Environmental
Protection.
-
- "I can't even find them," said Conklin, who
lives in New Jersey but could not get home. "To be stuck here and
have no one here I know is not a good feeling."
-
- Conklin said she had walked all the way down from the
72nd floor, losing her shoes at some point, and that the building "exploded
maybe five minutes after."
-
- "I panicked on the 13th floor, and that's when the
Fire Department took me out," she said.
-
- A woman named Christina, who declined to give her last
name, was on the 47th floor of One World Trade Center.
-
- "The whole building shook, and we saw stuff flying
all over the place, out the window. We smelled fire. We tried to run out,
and it was all smoke. It took us about half an hour to get out. There was
glass everywhere. Walking to the water, all of a sudden we heard the building
collapse. You couldn't see, you couldn't breathe."
-
- Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc. http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/newyork/ny-nyesc132363611sep13.story
___
-
- One last thing to keep track of: why have we heard nothing
in the press except one Reuters/AP article regarding the 12 tons of gold
in the basement of the WTC? Gold story here:
-
- http://us.news2.yimg.com/
|
